Page 786 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2018
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This motion has its genesis in intimate discussions with this mother. She has shared with me her personal story and the heartbreaking story of her child. Like many other Canberrans she is highly educated and enjoys good employment. She is also a loving and devoted mother who has always sought to do what is best for her children. But after unspeakable tragedy struck, this good mother set out to find answers. What had gone wrong? What could she have done differently? As she immersed herself in research she came to find answers to these and other questions.
She now realises that, if she had been better prepared, there were indeed warnings she could have recognised and things she should have done differently. For many people, such a realisation would result in overwhelming despair, but not for this mother and not for this child. Together they have forged an unstoppable commitment to helping protect other children and other families. This motion is designed to aid in doing just that.
Child sexual abuse is a scourge that has the capacity to reach into all families regardless of race, ethnicity or socio-economic status. According to the 2006 personal safety survey prepared by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1,294,000 Australians reported having experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 15; 74 per cent of these were women and 26 per cent were men. This means that child sexual abuse has reached at least 12 per cent of women and 4.5 per cent of men.
The impacts of child sexual abuse, often shortened to CSA in the literature, are enormous. I quote Professor Jill Astbury of Victoria University:
A significant body of research has demonstrated that the experience of CSA can exert long-lasting effects on brain development, psychological and social functioning, self-esteem, mental health, personality, sleep, health risk behaviours including substance use, self-harm and life expectancy.
These negative impacts often persist for years, sometimes for life. The economic cost is also enormous. A 2008 study by the Australian Childhood Foundation found that the cost to the Australian community of all child abuse was between $10.7 billion and $30.1 billion. Even if sexual abuse forms only a small percentage of these figures, it is still a staggering sum. I am confident that no-one in this chamber needs to be persuaded that for both of these reasons we should do everything in our power to prevent the sexual abuse of children and, when required, respond to it in the most appropriate ways.
Numerous prevention and education initiatives have been designed and implemented over the past several decades. As noted this year by Griffith University researcher Julia Rudolph and her colleagues, these efforts have overwhelmingly focused on enhancing children’s knowledge and behavioural skills to recognise, avoid and report sexual victimisation. However, Rudolph et al have also discussed the limitations of educational efforts that target children and strongly recommend a more diversified approach to child sexual abuse prevention with initiatives that target multiple levels of a child’s ecology. Of all these, well-informed parents and other primary caregivers were identified as the most promising way forward. She said:
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